Reading and really liking

I spent much of yesterday with Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (actually I am reading it in the Kindle Edition).

Throughout his career, King has explored fresh ways to blend the ordinary and the supernatural. His new novel imagines a time portal in a Maine diner that lets an English teacher go back to 1958 in an effort to stop Lee Harvey Oswald and — rewardingly for readers — also allows King to reflect on questions of memory, fate and free will as he richly evokes midcentury America. The past guards its secrets, this novel reminds us, and the horror behind the quotidian is time itself. (The New York Times)

Still reading Robert K. Massie’s excellent Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman [Kindle Edition]. I’ve made it to her coup and early years as empress. She was more sympathetic when she was a struggling princess.

King’s is one of The New York Times five fiction Best Books of 2011. Massie’s is among their 100 Notable Books of 2011.